Athletes, such as swimmers, train for various events and water sports to improve their performance. Swimmers train for general fitness or for events such as swim competitions, triathlons, and water polo matches. Swimmers train either individually or as a team. For an individual swimmer it is difficult to monitor lap times, lap count, heart rate and other information pertinent to determining and monitoring their swimming performance without hiring a coach to be on the side of the pool and record data. Hiring a coach for an individual swimmer is costly, time-consuming (for both the swimmer and the coach) and often in violation of pool rules. For swim teams with coaches, it is difficult for a single coach to capture lap times, lap count and heart rate for every swimmer during a swim practice.
Some individual swimmers and swim teams use a “pace clock” that allows swimmers, coaches, or other individuals to visually estimate lap times of an individual. A swimmer has the ability to “time” his or her laps (manually) using the pace clock. However, the swimmer must physically observe the clock when he or she begins swimming, strain to look at the clock when he or she has completed a lap, and then calculate the elapsed time since his or her first glance at the pace clock, in order to ascertain their lap time for each lap that is completed. This has clear disadvantages, and it distracts from the swimmer's ability to perform his or her swim training.
A prior attempt to overcome this disadvantage provides a touch pad on the side of the pool combined with a display, as shown in FIG. 1. A pool 100 is shown with a swimmer 110 swimming therein. The touch pad 120 detects each time there is contact between a swimmer and the pad using resistive or capacitive techniques, and the system computes the elapsed time since the prior contact. The touch pad 120 is operatively connected to a wall-mounted or deckside display 130 adapted to display the lap times to be viewed by swimmer 110 via line-of-sight 115. However, the touch pads are large, rigid, heavy, and expensive, and must be provided and installed by the swim facility and connected to the facility timing system control module and display. Additionally, the swimmer 110 may have to alter their stroke in order to view the display 130 via line-of-sight 115. Due to the high cost of the touch pads and the need to run cables, which are prone to wear and present a trip hazard, along the swim deck, the touch pads are often only installed during swim competitions, making them unavailable for training. Individual swimmers have no ability to use these touch pads without access to the facility timing system control module. Due to the large size, weight, cost and rigidity of the touch pads, it is impractical for an individual swimmer to bring their own system to the pool for training. Furthermore, for teams and individuals in a crowded pool, there is no mechanism for accounting for multiple swimmers per swim lane, nor for any storage of individual swim data, since the touch pad has no means of distinguishing the contact of one swimmer from another swimmer. An exemplary touch pad is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,358,456 entitled SWIMMING POOL TOUCHPAD. As with other prior art touch pads, this touch pad is large, rigid, and heavy (and presumably expensive based on the technology employed), and therefore impractical for an individual swimmer. Also, as with other prior art touch pads, it cannot be used in a multi-swimmer environment, since it cannot distinguish the contact of one swimmer from another swimmer. There is no solution found in the prior art that provides individual swimmers with a small, lightweight, portable and inexpensive overall swim training system and method that provides sufficient information, readily available, and able to be stored for future use.
It is thus desirable to provide a system and method for aquatic use that provides swimmers with a swim training system that is personalized to a discrete swimmer, yet readily usable by many swimmers when desired.